In this eclectic collection of essays, distinguished scholars from different and specialized disciplines discuss aspects of sex, gender, and gender and society. In his contribution to this series of essays on Gender and Society, Peter Goodfellow states, 'sex, the biological separation intomale and female, is controlled by DNA and is determined by DNA. Gender, the arbitrary social division between masculine and feminine, is a social construct that involves interaction between an individual and society.' The definition of gender offered by Goodfellow is cogently developed by GermaineGreer in her essay on women as victims of rapeDSone of the newest and most controversial aspects of modern criminology. Susan Watkins suggests that the understanding of gender has influenced the analysis of population change, the efforts by activists to ensure reductions in fertility internationally,and the acceptance of birth control in local communities in Kenya. This analysis is complimented by Michele Le Doeuff in a discussion of the complex interplay between reduced fertility, increased literacy, and the function of work in the 'everyday life of every woman whatever her social class orlevel of education.' The question of how the sexes differ in their perception and processing of information about their external world is tackled by Lucia Jacobs within a biological and evolutionary context. She proposes that sexual selection should be given credit for the rapid evolution of ourunique abilities and complex culture concluding that 'it is the female that is the smaller, the "ecological" sex, best adapted to survive in the ecological niche of the species, and it is the male who carries the heavier burden or handicap of sexual selection, his fitness dependent on arbitrarytraits that reduce his competitive ability as a human being, although they are all too necessary for his competitive ability as a man.' The contribution of the sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy focussed on sexual selection, drawing on a wide range of research on the physiological and behavioural responsesof subhuman primates but, appropriately, drawing her inspiration from Spencer's own writings on physical beauty and its consequences for posterity. The chapters in this book were originally delivered as The Herbert Spencer Lectures in 1995 at Oxford University.

Presents cases where women have killed men in self-defense and analyzes society's reluctance to accept their actions as justifiable

Offers profiles of successful women science writers

Traces developments in neuroendrocrinology from the 1950s through the 1980s while examining sex differences in the brain

A Field of her Own

Presents portraits of three Black women who struggle against slavery and lynching and worked to foster civil rights and suffrage between 1826 and 1954

The Masses was the most dynamic and influential left-wing magazine of the early twentieth century, a touchstone for understanding radical thought and social movements in the United States during that era. As a magazine that supported feminist issues, it played a crucial role in shaping public discourse about women's concerns. Women editors, fiction writers, poets, and activists like Mary Heaton Vorse, Inez Irwin, Jean Starr Untermeyer, Amy Lowell, and Mabel Dodge Luhan contributed as significantly to the magazine as better-known male figures. In this major revisionist work, Margaret C. Jones calls for reexamination of the relevance of Masses feminism to that of the 1990s. She explores women contributors` perspectives on crucial issues: patriarchy, birth control, the labor movement, woman suffrage, pacifism, and ethnicity. Jones also follows the subsequent careers of several prominent contributors - Mary Heaton Vorse, Dorothy Day, Louise Bryant, Adriana Spadoni, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Helen Hull - to understand later developments in the radical and feminist movements and their relevance to women`s issues in the 1990s. The book includes numerous examples of the writings and visual art of Masses women and a series of biographical /bibliographical sketches designed to aid other researchers. This book will be important reading for the fields of American studies, women's studies, and literary and political biography.

The first comprehensive history of the oldest religious Jewish women's organization in the U.S., Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women and its impact on both the Jewish community in the United States and American society in general.

Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.

Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons is a literary approach to consciousness where Donald Wesling denies that emotion is the scandal or handmaid of reason—rather emotion is the co-creator with reason of human life in the world. Discoveries in neuro-science in the 1990s Decade of the Brain have proven that thinking and feeling are wrapped with each other, and regulate and fulfill each other. Accepting this co-creative equality, we reveal a new role for literature, or a traditional role we’ve repressed: literature as a set of processes in time where we’ve thought feeling through stories about the lives of imaginary persons. We need these stories in order to practice emotions for when we return to the world from reading. Donald Wesling argues that to be more accurate in our dealings with stories, we require a grammar of this new recognition, where we build up traditional stylistics by a more careful tracking of emotion-states as these are set into writing. The first half of Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons offers a creative stock-taking of the current state of scholarship on emotion, based on wide reading in several fields. The second half gives three focused studies, rich in examples, of emotion as cognition, as story, and as historical structure of feeling